Join us as John Smout recounts his journey to Straniger Alm in the Austrian Alps, where alpine pastures and boggy slopes provide a backdrop for an extraordinary encounter with lizards at the edge of evolution: where egg layers and live-bearers meet.
Please describe your field site.
Our fieldwork takes place in Austria, around 1.5 km above sea level in the Carnic Alps. The field site is at Straniger Alm, just a few hundred meters from the Italian border. In Austria, an alm is a high-altitude mountain pasture, and Straniger Alm is owned communally by farmers from the nearby village of Stranig. The farmers graze their cows and goats there during the summer months and bring them down to the valley for the winter. The alm also has a guest house for hikers and other travelers, and a dairy which produces “bergkäse” or mountain cheese, and other milk products.
Photo credit: Molly Uzzell. Our field site at Straniger Alm. It might look like a “wild” place, but actually almost the whole landscape is cultivated – although plenty of wild animals and plants still make their home here.
The fieldwork site is basically contiguous with the pastureland, covering less than half a square kilometer of area, mostly running alongside a stream (the Stranigbach). The terrain is steep, however, covering a little over 200m elevation gain from the lowest to the highest point. The ground is often quite boggy, with large areas of sphagnum moss, especially near the stream. Elsewhere, the vegetation can be dense and thorny, with brambles covering some areas, alongside heather and alpenrose (a type of rhododendron), and occasional larches and spruce trees. Surrounding the pasture is a commercial coniferous agri-forest, managed for timber production.
Most importantly for our work there, Straniger Alm is the site of a unique hybrid zone between oviparous (egg-laying) and viviparous (giving birth to live young) lizards. Oviparous common lizards lay eggs enclosed in a calcified eggshell, which develop externally for 35 – 40 days before hatching; viviparous common lizards give birth to fully developed young enclosed in a thin, non-calcified membrane, from which the young emerge within a few hours or days.
What project are you doing?
Our fieldwork forms part of a 3.5-year NERC-funded project, “Sex specific fitness landscapes in the evolution of egg-laying vs live birth”, under PI Kathryn Elmer at the University of Glasgow.
Photo credit: John Smout. Our study species, the common lizard.
How long did you go up to the site for, and when do you do the fieldwork in the year?
The 2024 field season ran from the first week of June to the final week of September, a period of about 4 months. The 2025 field season is likely to be even longer, starting earlier in the year with the emergence of the lizards from hibernation in April/May. Travel to the field site is by car, up the mountain road from the Gail Valley north of the site – it is also accessible from the Italian side, but the road on that side is not as well maintained.
What accommodation do you stay in while on site?
For the first two months of the 2024 field season, we slept in a mountain hut in the upper half of the field site above the alm house. The hut has just two rooms, a kitchen with a wood-fired range, and a bunk room with four beds, as well as an outdoor toilet, and no running water – just a pump to raise water from a nearby stream. From August to September, we slept outdoors in tents in a different part of the site. For the last few weeks, we stayed in a guest room in the alm house itself.
What data are you gathering and what methods are you using?
Our current project focuses on the fitness tradeoffs faced by viviparous, oviparous and hybrid lizards, especially differences between male and female lizards of each type. Previous work at the site has shown differences in reproductive investment and reproductive success between oviparous, viviparous, and hybrid female lizards, but we know a lot less about the reproductive success of male lizards and the survival of offspring after hatching/birth. In 2024, we collected oviparous, viviparous and hybrid lizards of both sexes for controlled breeding experiments to start in 2025. For the pregnant females we caught, we also collected data on their reproductive traits – eggshell samples, embryo stage at oviposition, and incubation time, as well as other relevant data such as clutch size and weight, and maternal weight after oviposition/parturition.
This year, when the lizards emerge from hibernation and become reproductively active, we will not only collect data from the females and their clutches but also monitor the survival rate of the offspring, which will be maintained in captivity under naturalistic conditions.
Photo credit: John Smout & Molly Uzzell. Oviparous (left), viviparous (right) and hybrid (middle) Z. vivipara clutches from this year’s fieldwork. The differences in reproductive characteristics are dramatic, but hybrid lizards can still reproduce.
What have you learned from being up in the field, whether that be about field work logistics, some difficulties associated with field work, or some observations that you didn’t expect, related or not related to your project?
Most of the field team had been part of previous years’ field trips to the site, and so had some idea of what to expect. That said, last year’s field season was particularly challenging. For much of the four-month period, we were working very long hours, with limited access to outside help; mobile signal, electricity and access to the internet were all only intermittently available. We also dealt with unexpected challenges in terms of animal husbandry and care, new diseases we had not previously observed in the population, increased parasite burdens, and changes in the timing of oviposition, parturition and hatching. There’s a lot to investigate, but on a personal level, I think my experiences underscored the importance of allowing adequate time for rest and recuperation for everyone on the team and understanding the limits of what people can be asked to do.
Is there anything that you will be taking forward into your future fieldwork and is there anything that you think more people should know before heading to the field?
Despite several years prior experience, in some ways I felt under-prepared for last year’s field season – starting in June with the lizards’ reproductive period well underway, we were keen to get sampling immediately, but I think taking a few days at the start to take stock at the field site and prepare lizard boxes, set up tents and take inventory of equipment etc. might have helped the first few days feel a bit less chaotic.
Do you have any final pieces of wisdom or anecdotes which sum up your experience in the field?
A video of a weevil as it trundles along a fieldworker’s forearm with me explaining the Myth of Sisyphus to a field worker in the background (video credit: @liamswondrousworld on TikTok).
Acknowledgements
Written by John Laurence Smout, a research technician at the School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine (SBOHVM); edited by Shennice Knight and Praise Adeyemo, first-year PhD students at SBOHVM.
Photo credit for banner image: Mikmaq, Wikimedia Commons
If you are within SBOHVM and would like to submit a fieldwork diary, please download the questions from here and follow the instructions in the document.
